Monopoly Millionaires Preview

Monopoly gets a social makeover in our preview of Monopoly Millionaires

It’s hard to think of a more popular board game than Monopoly, so it’s surprising that it took this long for the original tycoon game to make its way to Facebook. Monopoly Millionaires combines the classic board game with a city building sim, and throws in some great social features as well.So put on your top hat, grab your cane, and check out our preview.

The game is actually divided into two main parts, with the first consisting of your game board. It’s set-up just like the Monopoly board game, with the same streets and locations. And just like in the board game, you can add houses and hotels to each of the streets. Colored houses can be purchased with cash and when there’s a house at each street you can set-up a hotel (though you’ll need a certain number of friends to do this.) Houses will pay out rent at regular intervals but you’ll also have to stop by the electricity company every so often to keep the lights on. If the power goes out, you don’t get any rent.

Monopoly Millionaires doesn’t feature an energy system like most Facebook games, instead you’re limited to dice rolls. And this is where the second part of the game comes in to play: you can also visit and play on your friends’ boards. You have a limited number of dice rolls (which regenerates over time) and these are used to make your way around the board, just like in the classic game. In fact, many of the rules remain in tact. If you land on luxury tax you’ll have to pay out, if you land on chance you’ll get a bonus card, and, yes, if you pass go you get $200. You can even go to jail.

The main difference, though, is that when you land on streets you don’t have to pay out rent. You’ll instead have to pick a card to collect cars representing the different streets. Doing this allows you to upgrade the houses on your board. Once you have a complete set for one color, you can upgrade. Strangely, this part of the game actually feels quite a bit like the McDonalds version of Monopoly, where you’re collecting individual locations on the board.

But there’s a lot more too it. You can set-up traps to mess around with your friends, like a speed trap that tickets anyone who moves past it or a time share that takes away a move if you land on it. There’s even some strategy to the different playing pieces. You’ll start with the always popular car, but eventually you can upgrade to other pieces, each of which has useful abilities, like the dog’s ability to sniff out street cards.

Monopoly Millionaires has just launched, so there’s still quite a bit to explore and there may even be a few changes coming as well. But either way, stay tuned to Gamezebo for our upcoming review.